Digital and Online Marketing Musings. Good, bad and ugly.

Category Archives: Digital display advertising

Unless they’ve had their head under a stone for the last 2 years, anyone in digital advertising will be aware of the current huge growth in programmatic media buying. In the US it currently makes up around 20% of digital budgets, with many marketeers planning for this to grow to 40% or more. In the UK the H2 2014 estimates are around 15% with predictions ranging up to 25% which would represent a huge 83% of all display advertising.

This presents a variety of issues for the agency and client media buyer, as new DSPs, exchanges, and technologies are launched seemingly every day. They are all (if you took each media representatives word for it) based on the most *amazing* technology, staffed with the cleverest PHD data boffins, and are therefore guaranteed to be the single best way to approach programmatic buying.

I have sat through so many powerpoint presentations in the last year with different coloured and shaped variations of diagrams aiming to represent the stack of technology and the billions of bidding decisions and data points being utilised, that I must admit to now being a bit powerpoint-blind.

In most media buying scenarios, you have an easy way of testing such a competitive market, which is to test them all over a set period of time and see whose technology wins according to the KPIs – volumes, CPAs, new business, what have you.

Sadly, testing multiple DSPs at the same time is at best impractical, and at worst, a way to invalidate results, waste a whole pile of cash – and annoy your customers all at the same time.

Here’s why:

1) Cookie bombing

In an all out competitive bun-fight, it’s not infeasible that one or more of the media partners will simply buy the cheapest mass inventory they can find, in the hope that having their cookies on as many devices as possible will mean that they’ll get (view) credit for more conversions, without actually having an impact on the user. This is especially risky in mass market scenarios, where many users will be buying/interacting anyway, and serving ads willy-nilly (especially if over half of them aren’t even seen) is basically a bit like cheating. Think of it as the shotgun approach – something will get hit, if you spray wildly enough.

2) Frequency & Bidding against yourself

With multiple buyers aiming at the same goal, and especially so where the market is smaller and necessitates re-targeting based on 1st party website data, there is a risk of this smaller target market seeing multiple ads from multiple providers, all in the same day. Not only is this wasteful, but risks annoying the very people who are or should be your best customers. Of course you can cap frequency at a campaign level but will it be real-time enough to capture all impressions in-flight and prevent the risk totally?

To make matters worse, if more than one DSP is bidding for the same user simultaneously, then they could be bidding against each other, and inflating the price which will, of course, be passed on the the advertiser.

3) Attribution & Fair testing

In such a DR driven sector like digital, display advertising naturally struggles for justification against such monsters as the SERP. Justifying impression-based sales, showcasing brand building and early-funnel strategies through clever use of first-touch and assist data are critical to ensure it gets the credit it deserves.

Adding complexity to the campaigns, competition for each customer touch point and making the true impact harder to see amongst the vast weeds of data is not going to result in a clearer view. The risk is that the widest/more scatter-gun approach will pay off, potentially leaving clever targeting & higher impact placements losing out.

If you can’t see the true result of your test, then it becomes pointless. This is where the amazing data capabilities of digital become a handicap rather than a help, as it becomes impossible to make business decisions based on the results, and hence they add nothing except data for data’s sake.

It doesn’t mean that you have stick with what you have – far from it, but there are measured ways to test more than one programmatic provider, which I’ll be covering in my next post.

This week one of my old clients, Direct Line, announced that it was setting up an in house agency. Apart from wincing on behalf of the incumbent MediaCom (and the amazing team I worked with who ran their paid search) this is a reflection of a lot of soul searching in the marketplace – and the question that I’ve been asked a lot in the last few months, namely “Would you recommend running digital marketing in house or through an agency?” – to which I don’t think there is a perfect answer.

Agency Pros.

The biggest benefit of using an agency is the flexibility and scalability to get things done. A dedicated team of experts, learning from a larger pool who work across various markets and hence can apply learnings quickly and easily, and hopefully avoid repeating the same mistakes or re-inventing the wheel for each individual client.

In addition to this there is a reduced staff overhead and capital expenditure to service marketing campaigns and plans that may not be always on, or to the same level – and therefore would entail a constantly fluctuating need for staff and possibly office space.

Traditionally the buying power of agencies has been seen as a major benefit but this is increasingly irrelevant in a growing digital world. Yes I’m sure the clout of the big agency networks still carries weight with TV and large print publishers, but there is only so much volume an agency can guarantee to secure the best rates without locking their clients into inappropriate media choices.

Digital media runs overwhelmingly on performance based buying models, either as a CPC/CPA. Even a low CPM buy only remains justified as long as the “effective CPA” formula works out at the back end. This means that the perceived value of the media is out of the hands of the media owner, and the old sales negotiation model is defunct.

The increasing combinations of media, client and social interaction data that enables Real Time Bidding mean that in theory any agency, technology or platform partner can and does engage in arbitrage through buying cheap network and exchange inventory, adding value with layers of data and selling on to the advertiser at whatever they can get away with.

As long as the client gets the customers they want at a rate that makes sense for their profit margins, this may seem fair, but when part of the cost they pay is driven by their own data, one could very rightly say that they should not be paying this premium, except maybe for the usage of the technology that enables it.

The elephant in the room

The agency world is a scary place to be right now. Recession has brought increasing pressure on client margins, meaning marketers and procurement departments are constantly picking away at agency fees – demanding more for the same fees, or indeed lower; with the constant threat of pitches used to keep the agency in line.

Agency fees are being pushed lower through supply and demand, and they race to economise and automate to make the figures add up. Meanwhile, (like the proverbial swan on the water with madly flapping legs) operational staff are running just to keep still, keeping abreast of all the changes in digital that mean entire tracking and attribution models are rewritten each year; new media, channels and delivery mechanisms are added monthly and still the ROI machine says:

MORE MORE MORE!

CHEAPER CHEAPER CHEAPER!

The nature of a market reducing fees and profitability even while it becomes more complicated and labour intensive is guaranteed to create pain for the people on the front line. It undermines agencies’ ability to invest in systems and procedures that would enable efficiencies, and inevitably means that mistakes are made, clients don’t get what they need and eventually the dreaded pitch becomes reality after all.

So the account goes to another agency, and the process begins again.

It’s painful, it’s bad business for both parties but it’s almost impossible to stop. Without a wholesale re-think of agency fees, values and expectations the impact of digital has been to make it harder to service clients profitably, just at a time when they need the most expertise. Not surprising then that they’re thinking about setting up their own talent pool.

In House Pros.

Outsourcing, silos and business change: The marketing world has always had to adapt as the consumer changes, and now that process is faster than ever. The ways that the consumer has changed now impacts more than just how you market to them. It’s how you sell, how you transact, your channel to market and how you follow up, it’s customer service, complaints, reviews and approval and advocacy and sharing. Every touchpoint is now possible across a variety of devices – and worse – bad experiences can be shared to the point of going viral worldwide in minutes, potentially destroying years of product development and business planning (Dasani in the UK, anyone?)

What this means is that the entire business often needs to change, sometimes radically, to adapt to consumer preferences. How fundamental this change needs to be can be masked if your comms are handled by external partners, plus also de-skilling your own internal staff.

Multiple teams within an agency, multiple agencies dealing with multiple product, marketing and discipline teams within a client means that the helicopter view that says “Whoa, we really need to change this!” gets missed, and each part of the machine keeps working to its own disparate aims without a central unifying mission or understanding.

Of course this can happen within an organisation too, it is not restricted to services that are outsourced, but you can guarantee that more disparate entities involved in something, the more difficult it is to integrate.

Data, data and more data: In a perfect world all marketers would have robust MI data that truly reflects the impact of their activities. By this I mean more than just to initial sale, but attrition and lifetime value metrics that can hugely impact the ROI of marketing. Too often it isn’t shared either internally or with stakeholders such as agencies – sometimes through politics or negotiation tactics; and often just because it’s a headache to export and see in any meaningful way even internally. My point is that the more actionable data we all have, internal or external the better job we can all do.

So the answer seems to be that whether internal or external, the most important issue is about integration and data, and having a digital leader that understands the nitty gritty, but is also able to capture the big picture and translate it into business actions.

Good agency staff care as much about your business success as you do; good marketers know that a customers’ interactions are a function of more than just the media plan.

It turns out that good business people are good business people wherever they work, so if you find the right person – keep that person – wherever they are.

There was a really interesting article on digiday this week about retargeting and how the industry enthusiasm for it is risking the health of retargeting, and increasing resentment for online advertising as a whole.

To give some background, the display ad industry has suffered from a reduction in the perceived value of their ad inventory ever since the industry’s inception. Many cost models now exist (CPC – cost per click, CPA – cost per action) but the original pricing model for online inventory was the CPM (cost per mille, yes I know it’s french but it means cost per thousand to the ordinary person). By cost per thousand they mean cost per thousand impressions, and an impression is counted each time one ad is served (each ad may have multiple images within a loop, a drop down or other engagement and run multiple times, but until the ad itself is clicked, or another link on the page, that still counts as only one impression).

When I first started in online at MSN in *cough* 1999, we asked for, and (sometimes) received, £26 CPMs for untargeted Hotmail inventory, and £29 for targeted inventory which then was only available based on content, not user demographics or any other criteria. Due to limited availability the MSN business channel was always sold out at a rate card of £29 CPM, while we’d do deals for, say £15 for Run of Hotmail, and run a LOT of house and charity ads.

That was during the dotcom boom, however, and things had to change, if only because all the 19 year olds with random website ideas (and funding) either became gazillionnaires or failed miserably. What remained after the chaos was real businesses doing real things and having to use a proper calculation of profitability to justify their share value. That coincided with added trackability of online, past the point of click and all the way to sales or leads that could be attributed back to a media campaign.

Trackability allowed a realistic value assessment (which became a stick with which to beat the display sector), and the huge growth of consumer usage of the internet meant that billions of available impressions were being added to the inventory of websites each month. Within a couple of years we also had networks brokering deals for massive volumes of blind remnant inventory that the publishers just wanted to make *something* from, and the CPMs kept tumbling.

From a few pounds in the mid 2000s, CPMs kept tumbling to sub £1 levels for large buys, meaning display publishers were constantly struggling to make money from their users, and the “pile it high, sell it cheap” approach was a self fulfilling disaster for advertisers as the vast majority of the inventory was wasted.

As users gradually became blind to the banner (the dominant 468×60 pixel image that held sway for a while), click through rates also fell from single figure %s to less than 0.25% meaning every advertiser and publisher was scrabbling to buy as cheap as possible as this was the only way to make the performance figures add up.

It didn’t help that all this was happening at the same time as the growth of search advertising, which with a CPC (cost per click) pricing model was a lot less risky than display, and also fits into the user journey much closer to the final sale, the death knell of display seemed almost palpable.

and then along came retargeting….

Retargeting hinges on cookies. Basically once you have interacted with an ad (clicked on it) or visited an advertisers’ website – anything that can result in a cookie on your PC, you are potentially identifiable (not personally but as a string of text/numbers) as someone who has done this action. This means that advertisers can either a) serve you a specific ad or b) in some instances decide not to advertise to you at all depending on the actions you’ve taken.

Here’s an example:

Yesterday I went on the BHS website to look at lighting in their sale.
Today when I visit the Huffington Post website, this is the ad I see – featuring the exact products I looked at yesterday:

This is a retargeting ad, and is possible because the cookie on my PC captured data of what I was looking at, and BHS have bought a retargeting campaign, probably from a large provider like Criteo or Struq, stating that they want to target people who’ve been to their site and abandoned items in their shopping baskets, to persuade them to come back and complete the purchase.

Brilliant stuff. This works like a DREAM compared to standard display ads.

Target market – BOOM.

In purchase mode – BOOM.

Relevant products – BOOM.

Happy users – BOOM.

No ad wastage – BOOM.

Inventory gains value – BOOM.

Comparative click through and purchase rates went through the roof, ads are capped to only show 4 times per user to avoid annoying them, suddenly display gets back on the media plan, and everyone’s happy, right?

In theory yes, except like pop ups in the mid 2000s, the most successful ad type gets used to the point of saturation. Many advertisers will now only use display for retargeting, and in their enthusiasm for it, they use multiple providers to serve the same campaign. The result of this is that the frequency capping becomes 4 per network or exchange (and many advertisers use several) so the user can see the ad 20 times+. Plus the complexity of managing this many campaigns means that it’s also unlikely they’re pulling client 1st party data through to show whether the sale was actually made or not – so, as in my case I’VE ALREADY BOUGHT THE DAMNED THING!

How likely is it that customers enjoy this experience and are encouraged to return another time?

Easy answer. It’s not.

<rant>

Given the amount of times that I see an ad after I’ve bought the product, or an insane number of times you’d think that it was difficult to prevent this happening, but it isn’t at all.

Any agency or advertiser using retargeting who doesn’t manage cross campaign frequency is risking not just their own customers, but increasing resentment for the whole online ad sector. And for crying out loud, drop a cookie when people buy so they don’t keep seeing it ad infinitum.

Having been in the media industry for *cough* 20 years this year, the scales fell from my eyes a long time ago. I assumed that everyone approached media and advertising with the same slightly raised eyebrow as me, so when people who don’t work in media (and hence probably do real jobs) express righteous anger at Facebook redesigns, their dwindling sense of privacy or misguidedly share one of those annoying “I hereby do not give you right to do blah blah…..” notices I am genuinely surprised that some people really haven’t figured it out.

For the avoidance of doubt, Facebook is a commercial entity, as is Google, as is ITV.

They are not publicly funded like the BBC, therefore their sole reason for creating ANYTHING is to make you use it and watch it – so that they can sell advertising around it. In addition to that, they can get more money for their advertising if they know more about their audience (yes, that’s you).

To give an example – imagine that Disney are selling their new animated kids’ movie. They may be willing to pay a certain amount for their ad to be seen in front of a thousand people. If those people can be proven to be parents, then their perceived value of those eyeballs grows. This makes the newspaper/magazine/TV station/website publisher much happier, and gives them an incentive to find out as much about you as they can, to increase your value to their advertisers.

If there is even further information available about viewers/listeners/users, such as the age of their children, whether they’ve liked other Disney animated films and if they’ve visited one of the Disney Parks in the last 12 months – that value can further grow enormously as it’s a good indicator that they’re more likely to buy the advertiser’s product.

Here’s an example of how it works on Facebook:

Facebook audience targeting

For the basic UK adult targeting above, Facebook recommends a CPC (cost per click) bid of between 25p to 54p, How much of this you’ll have to pay will depend on how fast you want to spend your budget, and supply and demand at the time you go live.

Now see what happens if you add some extra criteria about family status:

Facebook audience targeting with children aged 4-12.

As you can see, the number of people in the target audience has dropped (to less than 10% of the original number), and the price you’ll have to pay to show them your ads has increased, by about 30%. If these people respond more frequently to the ads and therefore the advertiser sells more DVDs, then it’s evidently still worth their while to pay a bit more, so everyone’s still happy.

But how much do they really know about me?

Well traditionally “brand” advertising has been sold around content, so you’ll see different ads around America’s Next Top Model than you do around Wheeler Dealers. The assumption is that certain types of people (gender, age bracket, purchasing habits) trend towards certain content.

Direct advertising, and especially since the growth of the internet is more likely to be sold around what we know about the person themselves.

ACORN advert for regional classification for advertisers

The 80s saw the launch of ACORN (A Classification of Regional Neighbourhoods) in the States, which segmented all US areas into demographic types – which was used to help advertisers to accurately target their direct mail and later TV, and now online across most countries.

Clearly people living in areas classified as “02 – Affluent working families with mortgages” will be worth more to the advertiser than “48 – Low incomes, high unemployment, single parents”.

It has ever been thus and means that where they can, advertisers will use the most detailed criteria available to increase the response to, and decrease the wastage of their advertising activity.

Social media, and people’s increasing willingness to share personal data has led to an explosion in the levels of targeting that an advertiser can access. To continue the Disney/Facebook example:

Facebook targeting options, Disney films

There are so many targeting criteria that can be used to target the Facebook audience, and all these options make the audience more valuable to the advertiser (and to Facebook). Disney films, parks and characters can be added to the interest category, and these people set up as a segment so that they will see the ads that are most targeted to them.

If the advertiser wanted to target grandparents also – say in the run up to Xmas, they can add extra age criteria to make it more relevant and tweak the ads even further.There is a segment called “babyboomers” who can be lured with nostalgic references to childhood toys of their youth.

Spooky?

Those who see the level of detail advertisers can access for the first time often react with horror – OMG!! They’re going to sell me stuff!!

Well my answer to that is

a) did you really think you get anything for free, really? and

b) at least the stuff they’ll try to sell you is vaguely relevant.

I’d be very bored very quickly if all the ads I ever saw were for golf equipment and incontinence pads (neither of which I have a need for, incidentally).

If you feel worried about your privacy then there are always ways you can prevent advertisers from knowing more about you.

Firstly, don’t be hanging around on Facebook. It’s like carrying a sandwich board around with you telling them how to sell to you, and when. If you must do, then set your posts to automatically show to “friends” only (not public), and don’t like/share ridiculous images that *obviously* aren’t going to suddenly start moving if you write a comment

While you’re at it, tick the “opt out” box on every form you ever fill in

Delete your cookies after every online session

Go and live in the desert, although you may just end up re-classified as “Self sufficient, rejecter of society, interested in green issues”.

Frankly, it’s a part of the world we live in, and whether you engage with it or not is your choice. You will see ads around every media you interact with, but you only make the advertiser’s job easier if you volunteer information to them. Choose wisely and carefully what you share with the public and commercial entities, and remember:

The first thing I knew about Facebook’s purchase of the Atlas ad serving suite from Microsoft last week was a trail of disbelieving social media commentary by colleagues saying “What? Are they insane?”. By “they” here they mean Facebook, as the overwhelming view amongst past and current digital media operators is that Atlas is a “pile of s***” and that Microsoft must be glad to be shot of it, even at the rock bottom price of $100million.

Facebook has an enormous job to do to regain the trust and support of the online marketing community for Atlas or anything else that they build based on its skeleton. I have spent the best part of the last 4 years complaining about Atlas to the tech support teams, to the product leads and vainly shouting and throwing objects at my screen when another huge spreadsheet of thousands of bespoke tracking URLs is lost in the ether at midnight when the campaign needs to go live by 8am.

When all pleading made no difference I made a very vocal point of persuading clients to move their advertising to other solutions wherever possible, and I am not the only one.

It wasn’t always thus – 5 or 6 years ago Atlas was the defacto ad server for every digital agency I knew, so much so that Google seemed to have played a slightly inferior hand with its 2007 purchase of Doubleclick, and Microsoft’s decision to buy Atlas seemed to make perfect sense. MS did make a classic 2nd mover mistake of desperately throwing money at the problem however, and the purchase raised gasps throughout the market with its $6.3billion cost (Yes, $6.3 billion) – more than double what Google had paid for its acquisition.

Granted that $6.3billion cost (Yes, $6.3 billion) was for the whole aQuantive group, which also included Razorfish (which they later sold for $530 million) and Drive PM, which was absorbed into the Microsoft Media Network (and arguably did add value to the offering). This didn’t hugely impact the end result however, which was still that Microsoft wrote down $6.2billion in 2012, mostly due to the aQuantive purchase, for which Atlas is the biggest culprit.

So how did Atlas go from the dominant ad server in a growth market, to losing the entire GDP of a small country (such as Liechstenstein) in 5 years?

Without seeing internal figures its impossible to say how much Microsoft has invested in Atlas technology since its purchase, but as a user it’s clear that the fundamentals haven’t changed since the mid 2000s. Every team I have worked on has been shouting in frustration at the Atlas team for years about usability and how they literally *hate* using it. The only tech in advertising that stimulates more frustration is DDS (cue bloodcurdling scream).

In the 5 years since Atlas was bought there have been multiple changes in the digital advertising space along with the rest of the technology world, most if not all of which expose Atlas as inferior to more nimble competitors:

The growth of paid search bid management software

Atlas search offers a very basic click tracking function rather than any operational help to the search operator. This means that any serious campaign will need another software such as Marin on top to ease the thousands of optimisation tasks and data analysis, which just adds cost to the technology stack, and yet more cookies with more potential data discrepancies into the mix.

Cross digital measurement attribution

Atlas “Engagement mapping” garnered a bit of support for about a minute until we realised that many competitor tags couldn’t be placed in the UAT (Universal Action Tag, their container tag solution). What’s the point in running an advertising campaign where your media choices are dictated by your tag provider, not their performance? Any cross-media tracking that exists needs to at least include all paid media (and preferably direct & organic driven traffic too), so again Atlas offers only a partial solution at best

Facebook & other social network launches

Facebook has obviously been a market changer for the advertising world, and its growth has also created a market for Facebook campaign management software. Good Facebook campaigns need hundreds of targeting clusters created to maximise creative performance, and this scale of tracking and the speed with which it needs to be done is impossible with something like Atlas.

Across all digital media many widely used technologies were developed to manage one type of media, but the market direction is towards bundling search, social and display management capabilities into the same technology. If that technology is already being used, such as the ad server (Doubleclick) or search bid management software (Marin and Ignition One) then the consolidation of technology saves an enormous amount of time and complexity.

The consolidation daddies of digital marketing technology are now Google and Adobe.

Google has an ad network, an exchange, an affiliate network an ad server and a free analytics suite sitting on the same technology stack as AdWords, the worlds largest global advertising platform. In the time it’s taken Atlas to lose all its customers, Google has totally rebuilt Doubleclick, and Doubleclick search, is adding new functions almost weekly.

Meanwhile Adobe’s frenzy of acquisitions in the last 2 years have added a Data Management Platform (DMP) and search management to its “Marketing Cloud” which now offers end to end creation, tracking and optimisation for video, social, search, site analytics and landing page testing.

While I understand that Facebook want to have access to technology that helps them to prove that FB advertising works, they’d have been better buying a small, nimble FB specialist plus a small ad serving company and building their own solution. Either way without site side analytics and/or search management their offering will not cover the full picture that a digital marketeer now wants to see (preferably with one login).

Add to this that unpicking someone elses’ tech to rebuild it and re-gaining the support of a busy, cynical group of people (with lots of shiny other options) is not a small task. Facebook will do well to learn from Microsoft’s mistakes that being the dominant force is not an unassailable position to be in. Watch out Facebook –

It is a universal belief in media negotiation that the other participant is, frankly, a bit stupid. The adversarial nature of so many negotiations leads to sales people assuming that agencies are blind to the true (brilliant) nature of the media they’re buying; and agencies’ assuming that sales people are all money grabbing liars who would sell their own mother for a few quid and a free jolly.

Having sat on both sides of the fence I now believe that most misunderstandings are due to context; exacerbated by the poor agency sod never having the time to truly get to know the media marketplace and enjoy the negotiation process. I’ve seen many buyers make bad choices and salespeople lose out because one or other of them doesn’t understand where the other, or the client is coming from, so I’ve attempted to dispel a few myths.

All this of course may be academic in a few years when all media is digitised and bought through Real Time Bidding, but in the meantime let’s all enjoy the process a bit more.

1) Don’t pile on the pressure.

I have heard media sales training sessions where the trainer has said, without irony, “If the client/agency is still saying no, they obviously still don’t have enough information.”. Quite apart from the potential damage that could result from harassing the media buyer until they are backed into a corner, the arrogance of this view appals me. There are definitely varying levels of knowledge amongst sales, agency and client staff; but there is always the possibility that these people have access to more/different information than you have, which may not be shareable and may in fact make their decision a stroke of genius. Either way, pressure sales techniques almost always backfire in business relationships where you hope or expect to speak to them again. I have seen media buyers refuse to pick up the phone to certain sales people as they’re actually quite scared of them, or advise their colleagues not to do business with them either due to their approach. Be gentle, and if necessary sacrifice the one sale for the longer term view.

2) Be generous with information

Having said all of the above, there will definitely be pieces of information to which you have access, that the media planner/buyer may not have seen or had the time to hunt out. Sharing things that make them understand your market/product better regularly – not just when you’re in the midst of a negotiation, is a great way to both be appreciated and to be seen as an expert. This applies even more to competitor information that their client may love to see. Any interesting snippets about other clients in the same sector where they’ve tried something and had a great success is always worth sharing (with as much proof of results as you can legally share), as this will almost always be shared directly with the client and get you further to the top of mind.

3) Answer the brief

I cannot name the number of times when I have shared a detailed brief with a short-list of media owners, with quite specific needs, only to be disappointed. In my experience the vast majority do not answer the actual brief, instead either sending a re-purposed sales PowerPoint with the client’s logo pasted in (and sometimes not editing the text to ensure that the rest of it doesn’t mention the previous client it was sent to); or maybe sending over a proposal which clearly misses the cost or performance criteria with a weak “Well if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” pitch, with no clear evidence of why the agency should risk their reputation on recommending this buy.

I cannot state too clearly – read the brief and answer the question, with just one sentence if necessary. If it is impossible to make the metrics/target work – say so, and say so early. This will save you both time and mean you get another crack at another campaign that may have different criteria, and a reputation for being honest, which is always a good thing in an incestuous industry.

4) Put your best foot forward – immediately.

Many times I have spoken to media buyers to tell them that they have not been chosen for a particular campaign, only for them to say “Oh, well if you’d told me, we could have matched those rates.” This is negotiation suicide. Basically the days of agencies having plenty of time to ring you back, negotiate rates gradually down and then eventually settle on something are well past. If you don’t put your “walk away” rates down at the very beginning (which other people will) you risk immediately being excluded, and by the time you speak to the buyer again the decision will already have been made and it’ll be too late for you to pull something out of the bag. Clearly going back with a very low rate every time isn’t healthy for your business, so the important part is packaging your rates correctly. By all means respond with a menu of options – one of which is rock bottom, but in offering these rates you are clear that the sacrifice will be in terms of the quality/data/visibility, and always have other options for the buyer to choose from. If they don’t see it, they can’t sell it to their client either. Tell them which is your favoured option, and why it is so much better for the client. Give it wings so that it’s hard for them to refuse. Even if the first client doesn’t like it or simply doesn’t have the budget, it may just get re-sent to their next client as an option.

5) Save the expenses for people you’re already doing business with

If you’re busy and stressed, the thought of having to make small talk with a random 23 year old who’ll try to sell to you for an hour and a half is not appealing. Even if it is at the poshest restaurant in town. Building business relationships absolutely makes sense, but save the jollies for after you’ve built a working relationship. The only time you should invite someone you don’t yet know is to something that’s useful to them and will make them better at their job – normally an educational seminar or large networking event with multiple people. One to one jollies are for the people who you are thanking or building something with, not a way in.